A
disabled, single mother described to the committee the day she was sanctioned
for missing an appointment because a flare-up of her hip condition meant she
was physically unable to walk or drive.

Despite explaining this to The
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), she was told she’d receive no money for
four weeks. The sanction remained in place for almost three months.

None of this occurred by magic. The examples the report
lists are not anomalies or accidents of a flawed system with good intentions.

They are the human consequences of this government’s active decision to bring
in “tougher” measures. Measures such as significantly increasing the amount of
money they were able to take from sanctioned disabled and chronically ill
people.

And quadrupling how long they could stop the benefits of a jobseeker
making a mild error (in 2012, the minimum sanction was increased to four weeks,
rather than one).

The DWP did not even bother to “first [test] their likely
impacts on claimants”, the report notes.

Forcing the unemployed to beg
charities for handouts is “motivational”, apparently.

Even for the 23-year-old
pregnant woman who, MPs heard, walked two miles to a food bank after her
benefits were stopped.

She was receiving employment and support allowance for
mental health problems following the stillborn birth of her first baby eight
months earlier.

She had missed one work-focused interview because on that day
she had found it too difficult to leave her flat. That is enough, apparently, to
leave a mentally ill, pregnant woman without food.

Emergency hardship payments are
meant to pick up some of the pieces of sanctions – a sort of sub-net when the
safety net has been cut.

Except the rub is that claimants of jobseeker’s
allowance are not allowed one until the 15th day of being sanctioned. So they
are left to feed themselves with nothing for two weeks.

This is not being done to the
middle classes with savings in the bank. Or those with power who are used to
navigating a complex system.

It is being done to the people who are already
struggling – where a hardship fund exists but the application process is
designed to be too difficult for vulnerable people to understand.

Or, as the
report states, making it so “the people potentially most in need of the
hardship system were the least likely to be able to access it”.

One clinically depressed man had his benefits sanctioned
when he didn’t attend an assessment for work capability because he didn’t have
the bus fare to get there.

His older sister told the committee that her brother
found it “impossible to cope with normal life” and “couldn’t open the mail”. He
was given no benefits for 16 months.

That the DWP is investigating 49
deaths of people in this system – including those “where suicide is associated
with DWP activity” – seems almost predictable against that backdrop.

The
government was not able to provide details to the committee of anything it had
done to alter how the DWP responds to claimants dying – or even to confirm how
many of the dead had been subject to a benefit sanction.

The MPs’ call that an
“independent review of benefit sanctions is urgently needed” seems almost
polite for what is going on here. People are literally starving and their crime
is that they dare to be poor and unemployed.

It is no surprise that the report
concludes there is limited evidence that benefit sanctions actually help people
find work.

A jobseeker system that has sanctions at its centre is founded on
the lie that the unemployed are too lazy to look for work unless they are
threatened. The DWP acts as if it is training disobedient dogs.

Stopping the money people need in
order to eat is not the purpose of government.

The benefit sanctions regime
should be scrapped – but let’s not stop there. The culture that created them
needs shredding to pieces.